bathroom-etiquette

I very much
believe in the “do not talk in the bathroom. Do not even say hi” rule. The
bathroom is for one thing only and it’s not talking. BUT a coworker and I were
in adjacent stalls and we got finished at the same time and then I just blurted
out without thinking, “HOW YOU DOING, POOP BUDDY!”

I know I said I learned my lesson last time… but I’m also a strong believer in second chances. Which is why I’ve decided to replace all the Camembert in the house… with skim-milk mozzarella cheese sticks.

Today when I was in the female bathroom someone thought I was a boy. I'm kinda happy but it's also so awkward and uncomfortable. I had to explain that I was a "girl" and it made me feel dysphoric. What should I do? I'm not confident enough to go into the male bathroom yet...

Lee says:

You can just say “Oh, that’s awkward! I’ll wash my hands and be on my way.” and that is true, they’ve made it awkward and so you’re leaving. But this is what you should do if you’ve already used the bathroom.

If you haven’t used the bathroom yet, you could say “Yeah, I actually get that a lot” and keep on doing what you’re doing. This way you don’t need to explain that you’re a girl (which isn’t true) and will hopefully confuse them a bit so they leave you alone.

If they’ve said it before you use the bathroom you could also go to the men’s one because then you know you’re passing at the moment so it should be okay. You could try to build up your confidence about it by going with a friend if possible, and if anyone says anything just use the same phases.

I don't like using the women's restroom, but I'm nervous about using the men's room because I don't feel like I pass very well (chest is too big, hair is too long, face is overall too feminine, et c). My mom won't let me get a binder or cut my hair shorter than shoulder length (which is how short it is right now). How can I build up my confidence enough to use the men's room?

Devon says:

It can be dangerous to use the men’s room if you don’t pass as a guy, so keep that in mind.

There is of course their bathroom etiquette, belonging to just the four of them, where they never need to shower at the same time and brush their teeth with their own brush each.

Then they have the who-steals-food-when, to avoid over-burdening the house elves or ending up with a few too many cauldron cakes or a bellyache. They have a studying-for-tests routine, with quiet hours spent together until late at night, when Peter will whisper them all a good night to signal they should go sleep.

And by all means, Remus’ favourite should be the how-we-take-care-of-Moony-after-moon. The other lads pile up into his bed, bringing Honeydukes chocolate and good banter, comfort that Pomfrey’s salves and charms cannot give him.

-

It’s not.

His favourite routine is when Sirius comes back from Quidditch practice on rainy days. His wet kit is dumped into a corner of the showers, spreading a cloying grass-mud-sweaty smell through the little area.

His shoes are by the bathroom door, muddy from the trod through the grass, to and from the castle.

And his curtains are closed against the England-dreary outside gloom, with little red-gold fuzzy lights flickering inside his enclosed space.

Remus enters the bubble of privacy, pushing himself through the curtains. James and Peter will be down in the kitchens, both ravenous, but Sirius is shivering under his covers and a couple of heating spells that never manage to warm his icicle toes or fingers.

Sirius doesn’t even open his eyes anymore, just lifts the cover and his arm for Remus to crawl underneath, a long-established ritual now that they are in their seventh year.

Much newer is the kiss he presses to Sirius’ lips, cool with rain and slack with exhaustion, but welcoming nevertheless.

Sirius, who claims that no heating spell could ever warm his limbs the way Remus’ body heat can; James and Peter would not suffice either.

Remus doesn’t mind, burying his nose in the crook of Sirius’ neck, deeply inhaling the freshly-showered-boy-musk, pressing another kiss to the pulse point before pressing their bodies a little closer still.

Cold toes brush against Remus’ calves where they wrap around his legs, but they are not freezing anymore, and when Sirius finally stops shaking, they both drift off into a pleasant slumber.

The thing that surprised Daniel was how little difference it actually made.

If you actually knew, the differences were obvious. At least, it was obvious to Daniel. They stood differently, moved differently, and of course they were both desperately struggling to fake an accent that didn’t come naturally to them. (Peggy’s American accent was a lot better than Jack’s attempt to sound British. Daniel took to saying “Bloody Hell!” in Jack’s dreadful accent every time he had the opportunity, just for the glares.)

So it amazed him that for three days, no one in the office picked up on it. He knew, and Rose knew, and the handful of scientists who were working around the clock (under threat of bodily injury from Peggy) to get them back to normal knew. Also, anyone who happened to hear the fierce, whispered arguments in the hallway outside the restrooms about bathroom etiquette when in the custody of someone else’s body would have known if they’d been paying attention.

But in general, the weird thing was that neither of them was really, fundamentally that different to work with. They both were skilled fighters and good with a gun; they both had an alarmingly awful sense of humor (Daniel never realized just how bad some of Peggy’s jokes were, until hearing her jokes coming out of Jack’s mouth); they both were good spies with a fairly broad knowledge base, even if it was in generally different areas – but, after working together as long as they had, they’d gotten in the habit of filling in for the other’s knowledge gaps, to the point where it was almost effortlessly seamless.

Daniel himself started forgetting occasionally, towards the end, which of them he was actually talking to.

He was relieved beyond measure, of course, when they got back to normal – not the least reason being that it had been unspeakably awkward pretending to date Jack Thompson (in Peggy’s body) while actually dating the person occupying Jack Thompson’s body. (Also, both of them had refused to kiss him – Peggy on the grounds that it wasn’t fair to Jack, and Jack on the same grounds except expressed more vehemently, through Peggy’s mouth.)

But he thought that they really couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of the point Peggy herself had spent the last two years trying to drive home to her male co-workers: that the difference between herself and the male agents around her was only skin deep.

Or possibly it was just that Jack and Peggy were more alike than he’d ever realized, and that was an epiphany that he was going to take awhile to work through.

I just saw the phrase “texting etiquette” and I nearly died from an early a.m. nerd breakdown.

Like the word “texting” is so weird here. The -ing form is not making an adjective the way we’d normally see it. “Texting etiquette” is not etiquette that texts the way a “jumping frog” is a frog that jumps. “Texting” here is a gerund, where you take a verb and turn it into a noun. Think “I like dancing over karate” where both dancing and karate are things. This particular noun is used as an adjective to tell which kind of etiquette, texting etiquette vs. airplane etiquette vs. public bathroom etiquette.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because “texting” comes from the verb “to text.” It’s a verb we’ve all made up in the past decade or so, and we’ve taken it from the noun, the text we send, the same way we’ve made verbs like “to Google” or “to motorboat.”

EXCEPT THAT THE NOUN “TEXT” actually is shortened from “text message,” where “text” is doing that same noun-as-adjective deal, telling you it’s a text message vs. a video message vs. a smoke-signal message.

WHICH MEANS that to put “texting” in a phrase like “texting etiquette” we’ve converted a noun to an adjective to a noun to a verb to a noun to an adjective. And we’ve done it in a weird unconscious, collective way where we all as English speakers are blindly feeling out the best way to express ourselves. We bend language over backwards to suit our whims, and we’re not even aware of it. Grammar does all the work for us, so instead of saying “etiquette of the action to send messages with text,” we say “texting etiquette” and get on with our lives.

So write that vaguepost about someone who won’t text you back, you beautiful human being. Grammar has your back.

taking charge - ‘"You can separate her and,“ the man looked the Doctor over slowly. "Lover boy, over here, in isolated holdings.”’

bathroom etiquette - ‘Would rose let the doctor into the bathroom if she was in the tub?’ & ‘
Person A is planning to take a shower but Person B steals it from them at the last second. Person A threatens to join them if Person B doesn’t give up the shower.’

shades of pink - ‘"Wow,“ he thought, "I wonder if that’s the exact same shade of pink as Rose’s…"’

I was in school, it was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break”, she gave me the key to the Disabled-Access toilet (as it was the closest one to my classroom).

It was the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me: I was a short, scrawny thing back then. I sometimes had trouble with doors, especially unlocking them, and I fumbled for a good minute or two in trying to get the blasted thing open.

Anyway, as I sat on my porcelain throne, there came a knocking at the door.

“Someone’s in here.” I called, disgruntled at this disturbance.

There came a pause, then the knocking resumed. It was faster now, more determined.

“Wait a minute!”

The knocking slowed, and a voice replied:

“Let me in. I need to come inside.”

The speaker’s tone was thin and reedy: an adult I didn’t recognise. I may have been six, but I also had a fairly good understanding of bathroom etiquette. Mainly that you didn’t let more than one person into an area only slightly larger than a cupboard.

“Go away!”

The knocking intensified again, until it was a frantic drum-beat, just a few feet from me and out-of-sight. I heard the voice shouting something, growing more and more desperate:

“Let me in! Just open the door, please!”

I was terrified, by that point. The hammering and yelling was so loud, and yet nobody had come to investigate it. Eventually, my teacher came to find me, angry because I had been gone almost half an hour. When I refused open the door to let her in, she got a spare key from the receptionist and then took me to the headmaster’s office and called my parents. I was suspended for the rest of the week. I never told anyone what happened.

It was a few weeks before my next encounter with this phenomenon. I had just celebrated my seventh birthday, and my family were having a barbecue in my honour. It was a gloriously sunny day, but as soon as we’d set everything up in the allotments behind our house, the coal refused to light. My dad asked me to go and get some fire-starters from the shed in the front garden.

It was pretty cramped inside, and I wouldn’t fit all the way, so I just opened it up, stood on tip-toes to reach the shelf holding my objective, then shut the door. As I turned away, a frantic knocking hit the other side of the door.

“Open up! I need to come through!” This voice was not the one I’d heard the month before: it was deeper, more brooding and angry.

I said nothing, and hurried away. I had no idea what was happening, but it frightened me. As I walked away, There came a final ‘thump’, like a fist being slammed against wood, and I heard his voice again:

I ran back to my party, and spent the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder.

As you might have guessed by now, there were a lot of these voices. I count at least thirty, total. Every month or so, I used to get them: pleading to be let through doors. Almost always, it would be immediately after I shut the door behind me, as though these strange entities had been following me. I never told anyone, but to be honest, I kinda just got used to it. It always made me jump, and some of the voices would make me feel uneasy, but I knew that I was safe, so long as I did not open the door. Some of the voices, I got used to, to the extent that I even named them. There was one which always used to appear at my front door, at home. We have frosted glass, and I could see a silhouette of an average-sized man wearing a cap of some kind. He never spoke, but occasionally would push envelopes containing blank pieces of paper through the letterbox. I called him the postman. He was one of the more unsettling ones. If I tried to speak to him, he would look up, sharply, then begin knocking. I generally left the Postman alone.

Twenty years on, and I have retained as much normality as possible. I have plenty of friends, and I even have an on-and-off relationship with a girl I met last year. Not bad for a guy who wakes up in the middle of the night and listens intently to noises you can’t hear on the other side of the door. Yeah, my buddies think I’m strange and kooky, but they put up with it. They’re all great. I’ll miss them.

You see, things have started to get strange. Well, stranger than usual, I suppose. Three weeks ago, I awoke, sweating and crying, though I do not know why. My dream had been, from what I recall, fairly normal, when a huge shadow had abruptly fallen over everything. Literally, the second I opened my eyes, there came the knocking at my bedroom door. Not just normal knocking, though. This was truly frantic.

“Who goes there?” I yelled.

“P-please. Help us…” it replied. I was surprised. It was the sadistic, angry voice that I remember from my father’s shed on my seventh birthday, but it seemed genuinely sincere. There was a pained tone to it, too: as though the speaker were grievously wounded. I actually found myself pulling back the sheets to get up, but I hesitated. I had never before been tempted to open the door. I suppose, as a child, I had so rigorously drummed-in to my head the idea that whatever lay beyond was evil that it was just common sense. To be quite honest, I came very close to letting the thing into my room, that morning. I held out, in the end.

It got worse. Just two days later, I was in my local corner-shop. I’d just paid for a bottle of milk and a newspaper when a great force slammed against the shop door. Simultaneously, a voice began screaming: a long, keening squeal of pain. I whirled to face the door, but there were so many fliers plastered over the glass that I could only just make out the shape of a woman on the other side, slapping her palms against the window. The shopkeeper stared at me, as though I were crazy. In the end, I asked if he had a bathroom I could use, murmured some half-thought-out excuse and hid there for ten minutes until the screaming stopped. There were four more incidents between then and now: a mixture of screams and tearful begging. The Postman stopped by yesterday, too. He knocked, politely, before sliding his usual letter through the letterbox.

Then another. Then another.

A total of ten plain, brown envelopes. The Postman waited for a few minutes, knocking occasionally, and then he left me alone.

Each letter contained a sheet of A4 paper. But somebody had taken a black pen to the pages, scribbling and shading them with such vigour that there were large tears around the centre, and the edges were frayed. I shoved them back into their envelopes and tried to put it from my mind.

Earlier, my bedroom door shook, violently. It wasn’t a scream, or a howl, or a roar that I heard, though. It was just crying. Dozens and dozens of voices, sobbing quietly. Another blow struck my door. Plaster flaked from the walls and twirled to the carpet. Still no pleas or bargaining, just sobbing.

Crash.

I jumped up from my chair.

‘Crash’.

A hairline crack split the frame of the door in one corner.

My phone began to ring, and I heard a sharp rapping at the glass of my window, behind the curtains. I tried answering the phone, but it was simply yet more voices crying. Not even sobbing, though: more like bawling in terror and anguish. I hung up, but it kept ringing, so I took the battery out.

I have shoved most of my furniture against the door and window. It has been three hours since this latest attempt at entry began. The battering has not abated. Nor has the crying. I’m fairly sure that my door won’t hold much longer. As for my mediocre barricade; it could be swept aside in two minutes. I find myself faced with the very-real possibility of death, so I am writing this memoir of sorts, just in case something does happen.

‘Crash’.

What do they want?

‘Crash’.

Do they even want to hurt me?

‘Crash’.

They seemed fearless, even malicious before.

‘Crash’.

What could have driven them to this?

‘Crash’.

Maybe I should open the door.

‘Crash’.

Maybe I should let them in.

‘…’

Silence fell. I realised that even the crying had ceased. For a whole minute, I sat there. Then I got up and hurried to my door, eager to escape this claustrophobic situation. Perhaps I’d go outside, where I could be far away from any doors, and from the damned knocking. I pulled-away my barricade and turned the handle.

Locked.

Kneeling, I peered through the keyhole. Beyond my bedroom door was not the corridor that I remembered, but another room, some kind of library or classroom, I think. It seemed unoccupied, but for one kid, sitting and reading with his back to me. I banged on the door.

He turned from me. Confused and exasperated, I began to stand up. A loud ‘bang’ shattered the silence once more. I realised it sounded like a fist being pounded against glass. My window!

I heard it again. But this was not the frantic knocking of somebody wanting to get inside. This was not even an attempt to break in. Whatever was beyond the curtain and glass knew I was inside. It knew I was frightened. In the most predatory and sadistic way possible, it wanted me to be afraid.

I was in school, it was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break”, she gave me the key to the Disabled-Access toilet (as it was the closest one to my classroom).

It was the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me: I was a short, scrawny thing back then. I sometimes had trouble with doors, especially unlocking them, and I fumbled for a good minute or two in trying to get the blasted thing open.

Anyway, as I sat on my porcelain throne, there came a knocking at the door.

“Someone’s in here.” I called, disgruntled at this disturbance.

There came a pause, then the knocking resumed. It was faster now, more determined.

“Wait a minute!”

The knocking slowed, and a voice replied:

“Let me in. I need to come inside.”

The speaker’s tone was thin and reedy: an adult I didn’t recognise. I may have been six, but I also had a fairly good understanding of bathroom etiquette. Mainly that you didn’t let more than one person into an area only slightly larger than a cupboard.

“Go away!”

The knocking intensified again, until it was a frantic drum-beat, just a few feet from me and out-of-sight. I heard the voice shouting something, growing more and more desperate:

“Let me in! Just open the door, please!”

I was terrified, by that point. The hammering and yelling was so loud, and yet nobody had come to investigate it. Eventually, my teacher came to find me, angry because I had been gone almost half an hour. When I refused open the door to let her in, she got a spare key from the receptionist and then took me to the headmaster’s office and called my parents. I was suspended for the rest of the week. I never told anyone what happened.

It was a few weeks before my next encounter with this phenomenon. I had just celebrated my seventh birthday, and my family were having a barbecue in my honour. It was a gloriously sunny day, but as soon as we’d set everything up in the allotments behind our house, the coal refused to light. My dad asked me to go and get some fire-starters from the shed in the front garden.

It was pretty cramped inside, and I wouldn’t fit all the way, so I just opened it up, stood on tip-toes to reach the shelf holding my objective, then shut the door. As I turned away, a frantic knocking hit the other side of the door.

“Open up! I need to come through!” This voice was not the one I’d heard the month before: it was deeper, more brooding and angry.

I said nothing, and hurried away. I had no idea what was happening, but it frightened me. As I walked away, There came a final ‘thump’, like a fist being slammed against wood, and I heard his voice again:

I ran back to my party, and spent the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder.

As you might have guessed by now, there were a lot of these voices. I count at least thirty, total. Every month or so, I used to get them: pleading to be let through doors. Almost always, it would be immediately after I shut the door behind me, as though these strange entities had been following me. I never told anyone, but to be honest, I kinda just got used to it. It always made me jump, and some of the voices would make me feel uneasy, but I knew that I was safe, so long as I did not open the door. Some of the voices, I got used to, to the extent that I even named them. There was one which always used to appear at my front door, at home. We have frosted glass, and I could see a silhouette of an average-sized man wearing a cap of some kind. He never spoke, but occasionally would push envelopes containing blank pieces of paper through the letterbox. I called him the postman. He was one of the more unsettling ones. If I tried to speak to him, he would look up, sharply, then begin knocking. I generally left the Postman alone.

Twenty years on, and I have retained as much normality as possible. I have plenty of friends, and I even have an on-and-off relationship with a girl I met last year. Not bad for a guy who wakes up in the middle of the night and listens intently to noises you can’t hear on the other side of the door. Yeah, my buddies think I’m strange and kooky, but they put up with it. They’re all great. I’ll miss them.

You see, things have started to get strange. Well, stranger than usual, I suppose. Three weeks ago, I awoke, sweating and crying, though I do not know why. My dream had been, from what I recall, fairly normal, when a huge shadow had abruptly fallen over everything. Literally, the second I opened my eyes, there came the knocking at my bedroom door. Not just normal knocking, though. This was truly frantic.

“Who goes there?” I yelled.

“P-please. Help us…” it replied. I was surprised. It was the sadistic, angry voice that I remember from my father’s shed on my seventh birthday, but it seemed genuinely sincere. There was a pained tone to it, too: as though the speaker were grievously wounded. I actually found myself pulling back the sheets to get up, but I hesitated. I had never before been tempted to open the door. I suppose, as a child, I had so rigorously drummed-in to my head the idea that whatever lay beyond was evil that it was just common sense. To be quite honest, I came very close to letting the thing into my room, that morning. I held out, in the end.

It got worse. Just two days later, I was in my local corner-shop. I’d just paid for a bottle of milk and a newspaper when a great force slammed against the shop door. Simultaneously, a voice began screaming: a long, keening squeal of pain. I whirled to face the door, but there were so many fliers plastered over the glass that I could only just make out the shape of a woman on the other side, slapping her palms against the window. The shopkeeper stared at me, as though I were crazy. In the end, I asked if he had a bathroom I could use, murmured some half-thought-out excuse and hid there for ten minutes until the screaming stopped. There were four more incidents between then and now: a mixture of screams and tearful begging. The Postman stopped by yesterday, too. He knocked, politely, before sliding his usual letter through the letterbox.

Then another. Then another.

A total of ten plain, brown envelopes. The Postman waited for a few minutes, knocking occasionally, and then he left me alone.

Each letter contained a sheet of A4 paper. But somebody had taken a black pen to the pages, scribbling and shading them with such vigour that there were large tears around the centre, and the edges were frayed. I shoved them back into their envelopes and tried to put it from my mind.

Earlier, my bedroom door shook, violently. It wasn’t a scream, or a howl, or a roar that I heard, though. It was just crying. Dozens and dozens of voices, sobbing quietly. Another blow struck my door. Plaster flaked from the walls and twirled to the carpet. Still no pleas or bargaining, just sobbing.

Crash.

I jumped up from my chair.

‘Crash’.

A hairline crack split the frame of the door in one corner.

My phone began to ring, and I heard a sharp rapping at the glass of my window, behind the curtains. I tried answering the phone, but it was simply yet more voices crying. Not even sobbing, though: more like bawling in terror and anguish. I hung up, but it kept ringing, so I took the battery out.

I have shoved most of my furniture against the door and window. It has been three hours since this latest attempt at entry began. The battering has not abated. Nor has the crying. I’m fairly sure that my door won’t hold much longer. As for my mediocre barricade; it could be swept aside in two minutes. I find myself faced with the very-real possibility of death, so I am writing this memoir of sorts, just in case something does happen.

‘Crash’.

What do they want?

‘Crash’.

Do they even want to hurt me?

‘Crash’.

They seemed fearless, even malicious before.

‘Crash’.

What could have driven them to this?

‘Crash’.

Maybe I should open the door.

‘Crash’.

Maybe I should let them in.

‘…’

Silence fell. I realised that even the crying had ceased. For a whole minute, I sat there. Then I got up and hurried to my door, eager to escape this claustrophobic situation. Perhaps I’d go outside, where I could be far away from any doors, and from the damned knocking. I pulled-away my barricade and turned the handle.

Locked.

Kneeling, I peered through the keyhole. Beyond my bedroom door was not the corridor that I remembered, but another room, some kind of library or classroom, I think. It seemed unoccupied, but for one kid, sitting and reading with his back to me. I banged on the door.

He turned from me. Confused and exasperated, I began to stand up. A loud ‘bang’ shattered the silence once more. I realised it sounded like a fist being pounded against glass. My window!

I heard it again. But this was not the frantic knocking of somebody wanting to get inside. This was not even an attempt to break in. Whatever was beyond the curtain and glass knew I was inside. It knew I was frightened. In the most predatory and sadistic way possible, it wanted me to be afraid.

Only under very special circumstances, if we’re talking before they get together properly. For instance:

“Rose, do you have any idea how difficult it is to concentrate with you doing that?”

She glared at him. “You’re the one who interrupted me. You’re the one who came into my private bathroom whilst I was having a very private bath.”

“Yes, and you’re the one who cocked up the TARDIS’ plumbing,” he retorted, tongue poking out between his teeth as he fiddled with the pipes under the sink. “Besides, you said you didn’t mind me fixing it up while you’re still in there. If you remember, I did offer to leave and come back to sort it later…”

It was true, she thought, sighing in frustration. She had made the executive decision to stay very much in the bath whilst he sorted out the plumbing problem. And, fine, so she’d thought that having a perfect view of his pinstriped bum whilst he was on his hands and knees a few feet away from her would be a lovely way to pass the time.